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Prairie   Listen
noun
Prairie  n.  
1.
An extensive tract of level or rolling land, destitute of trees, covered with coarse grass, and usually characterized by a deep, fertile soil. They abound throughout the Mississippi valley, between the Alleghanies and the Rocky mountains. "From the forests and the prairies, From the great lakes of the northland."
2.
A meadow or tract of grass; especially, a so called natural meadow.
Prairie chicken (Zool.), any American grouse of the genus Tympanuchus, especially Tympanuchus Americanus (formerly Tympanuchus cupido), which inhabits the prairies of the central United States. Applied also to the sharp-tailed grouse.
Prairie clover (Bot.), any plant of the leguminous genus Petalostemon, having small rosy or white flowers in dense terminal heads or spikes. Several species occur in the prairies of the United States.
Prairie dock (Bot.), a coarse composite plant (Silphium terebinthaceum) with large rough leaves and yellow flowers, found in the Western prairies.
Prairie dog (Zool.), a small American rodent (Cynomys Ludovicianus) allied to the marmots. It inhabits the plains west of the Mississippi. The prairie dogs burrow in the ground in large warrens, and have a sharp bark like that of a dog. Called also prairie marmot.
Prairie grouse. Same as Prairie chicken, above.
Prairie hare (Zool.), a large long-eared Western hare (Lepus campestris). See Jack rabbit, under 2d Jack.
Prairie hawk, Prairie falcon (Zool.), a falcon of Western North America (Falco Mexicanus). The upper parts are brown. The tail has transverse bands of white; the under parts, longitudinal streaks and spots of brown.
Prairie hen. (Zool.) Same as Prairie chicken, above.
Prairie itch (Med.), an affection of the skin attended with intense itching, which is observed in the Northern and Western United States; also called swamp itch, winter itch.
Prairie marmot. (Zool.) Same as Prairie dog, above.
Prairie mole (Zool.), a large American mole (Scalops argentatus), native of the Western prairies.
Prairie pigeon, Prairie plover, or Prairie snipe (Zool.), the upland plover. See Plover, n., 2.
Prairie rattlesnake (Zool.), the massasauga.
Prairie snake (Zool.), a large harmless American snake (Masticophis flavigularis). It is pale yellow, tinged with brown above.
Prairie squirrel (Zool.), any American ground squirrel of the genus Spermophilus, inhabiting prairies; called also gopher.
Prairie turnip (Bot.), the edible turnip-shaped farinaceous root of a leguminous plant (Psoralea esculenta) of the Upper Missouri region; also, the plant itself. Called also pomme blanche, and pomme de prairie.
Prairie warbler (Zool.), a bright-colored American warbler (Dendroica discolor). The back is olive yellow, with a group of reddish spots in the middle; the under parts and the parts around the eyes are bright yellow; the sides of the throat and spots along the sides, black; three outer tail feathers partly white.
Prairie wolf. (Zool.) See Coyote.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Prairie" Quotes from Famous Books



... sea, Dark and deep and grand, forever wrapt in myth and mystery. Lo he laughs along the highlands, leaping o'er the granite walls: Lo he sleeps among the islands, where the loon her lover calls. Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never finding, till the tropic gulf he gains. In his mighty arms he claspeth now an empire broad and grand; In his left hand lo he graspeth leagues of fen and forest land; In his right the mighty mountains, hoary with ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon

... quarter. There is no considerable assembly of troops in our neighbourhood as yet; the flank companies, embodied under Colonel Young, are on their march, and the 2,000 militia will form a chain of posts from St. John's to La Prairie. The town militia of this and Quebec, to the amount of 3,000 in each city, have volunteered being embodied and drilled, and will take their proportion of garrison duty to relieve the troops. The proclamation for declaring martial law is prepared, and ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper

... years in Chatham county, North Carolina, and is now a member of the Baptist Church, at Otter Creek Prairie, Illinois. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... him more keenly than did his prospector's pick and shovel and pan seemed to imply that he was growing old. He was a silent man, by occupation and by nature, so he said nothing about it; but, like the wild things of prairie and wood, instinctively began preparing for the winter of his life. Where he had lately been washing tentatively the sand along Snake River, he built a ranch. His prospector's tools he used in digging ditches to irrigate ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... firmly in local option in all things; but there is no reason why New York, or any other great city, should live as Kansas and Idaho live. I prefer New York because a big city gives me a spiritual uplift that a prairie town does not. It is my privilege to live where I desire. I like to hear fine music, to come in contact with intellectuals; to go to plays that are worth while; to read books that satisfy my soul. I find such a life in New York. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... a month old, the necessity of giving him a name became apparent. He had generally been known as "the Kid," "Stumpy's boy," "the Coyote" [Footnote: Coyote: also called prairie wolf.] (an allusion to his vocal powers), and even by Kentuck's endearing diminutive of "the little cus." But these were felt to be vague and unsatisfactory, and were at last dismissed under another influence. Gamblers and adventurers ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... peninsula of Corea. . . . There was a time when the rocky barriers of the Thracian Bosphorus gave way and the Black Sea subsided. It had covered a vast area in the north and east. Now this area became drained, and was known as the ancient Lectonia: it is now the prairie region of Russia, and the granary ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... letters home and requested his father to send him a remittance to Galveston. With the little money they bad, mustangs and provisions were purchased and they started on a long ride to Corpus Christi. It was a wild journey through the chaparral, over the burnt and dried grass of the prairie, across swamps and rivers; but they made the two hundred miles in eight days. Here they separated. While his companions sought employment with the ranchers, Paul for consideration of his mustang, rifle ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... 2 Frank the Young Naturalist 3 Frank in the Woods 4 Frank on the Lower Mississippi 5 Frank on a Gunboat 6 Frank Before Vicksburg 7 Frank on the Prairie 8 Frank at Don Carlos Ranch 9 The First Capture 10 Struggle for a Fortune, ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson

... fro, to measure the destinies of arms, he often stopped, with his thoughtful eyes upon the carpet, to ask if his life were real and if he were the arbiter of so tremendous issues, or whether it was not all a fever-dream, snatched from his sofa in the routine office of the Prairie state. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... prairie chickens, pertaters, hed made hot bread 'n coffee, 'n fried bernanners, and opened can fruit, and brot out ther honey 'nd two kinds o' pickles, ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin

... the town, past the railroad buildings, and well on the prairie, Sinclair saw the girl walking with the "young feller." He was talking earnestly to her, and her eyes were cast down. She looked pretty and, in a way, graceful; and there was in her attire a noticeable attempt at neatness, and a faint reminiscence of by-gone ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various

... Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free,' but all are one. Get high enough up upon the hill, and the hedges between the fields are barely perceptible. Live on the elevation to which the Gospel of Jesus Christ lifts men, and you look down upon a great prairie, without a fence or a ditch or a division. So my text comes with profound significance, 'Let us do good to all,' because all are included in the sweep of that great purpose of love, and in the redeeming ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... found them 2 mi. east of here in flat sound asleep about 3 P.M. At 6 went to flat 1/4 mi. N. of camp to tie Pete, leading Monte by bell strap almost stepped on rattler 3 ft. long. 10 rattles & a button. Killed him. To date, 1 Prairie rattler, 3 Diamond back & 8 sidewinders, 12 in ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... because of the enormous amount of rock waste which the river daily bears to the Gulf of California. In time, a long time as years are measured, the gulf will be entirely filled—and what a valley of prairie land there ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... of an ancient pride Drew my feet to her willing side. My comrade, she, in the Touchwood Camp, To ride, hunt, trail by the fire-fly lamp; To track the moose to his moose-yard; pass The bustard's doom through the prairie grass; To hark at night to the crying loon Beat idle wings on the still lagoon; To hide from death in the drifting snow, To slay the last of the buffalo. . . . Ah, well, I speak of the days that were; And I swear to you, I was kind to her. I lost her. How are the best friends lost? ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... call a little book, which contains a little collection of little sketches, "Seashore and Prairie," we do not see. It is rather a big and an affected name for such a slight thing. But it is bright and pleasant, and well suited to the needs of those who cannot fix their attention long upon any subject. We regret to see in it marks of that extravagance and affectation ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... this story sounds a good deal like an episode in a dime novel, and may well be taken with a grain of allowance. Did remote prairie cabins in those days have grindstones and carving knives? And why should the would-be murderers use a knife when ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs

... collected in the neighborhood of St. Louis twenty-one men, principally Creole and Canadian voyageurs, who had become familiar with prairie life in the service of the fur companies in the Indian country. Mr. Charles Preuss, native of Germany, was my assistant in the topographical part of the survey; L. Maxwell, of Kaskaskia, had been engaged as hunter, and ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... be hidden away in the hills and forests over which they were passing—rich outcroppings of gold, silver and copper. Perhaps the Major was trying to locate them from the air. Here and there they passed over broad stretches of prairie, the grass of which would feed numberless herds of cattle. Perhaps, too, the Major was examining these with an eye to future gain. Then, again Barney thought of the illegal wireless station and he idly speculated on ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell

... Brownsville. Then came the feeding and caring for all these troops—a difficult matter—for those at Victoria and San Antonio had to be provisioned overland from Indianola across the "hog-wallow prairie," while the supplies for the forces at Brownsville and along the Rio Grande must come by way of Brazos Santiago, from which point I was obliged to construct, with the labor of the men, a railroad to Clarksville, a ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... Traversing a rocky prairie inflated with hacks, you arrive late in the afternoon at a curbed boundary, too fatigued in body and too suffocated with dust to resent the insult to your common-sense implied in the announcement that you have merely crossed what is called an Avenue. Recovered from your ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... the old Avenue buses on this line. No. 27. He says he is older than I am. He's a liar. Sometimes I think I am the oldest bus in all the world, and that I ought to be enjoying myself in the Smithsonian, instead of dragging out my existence bumping over boulders and prairie grass. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... else did you expect?" she asked gently. "Most men are the same. News that there is a woman to be found situated such as you are spreads through the ranks of them like—like—like a prairie fire. It goes whispering from one lip to another. You can never tell where it starts. You can never tell where it ends. As soon as a man knows that money can buy a woman he wants, he'll scrape the bottom of the Bank of England to get ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... argument drawn from nature herself. If you correctly remember, the first time I had the pleasure of seeing you was on the island of Galveston, many years ago. Do you remember relating to me at that time an incident concerning the effects of a prairie on fire, that you had yourself witnessed but a few days previously, near the town of Matagorde? If I recollect correctly, you stated that on your return journey from that place, you passed on the way the charred remains of two wagon-loads of cotton, and three human beings, that the night before ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes

... buffalo; there a gaunt coyote crouching in the chaparral; a cluster of giant oaks; far off, a waving line of mountain peaks; a canon with vultures sailing high above it; cow boys, and a shoreless sea of prairie, with no shadows except those cast by filmy clouds drifting against the sun. Slowly turning the leaves, which showed everywhere a master's skilful hand, Beryl found two sheets of paper tied together with a strand of silk; and between them lay a fold of tissue paper, to preserve some delicate lines. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... consent was readily granted to all who had not been excused on a similar errand the day before. The cook and horse-wrangler were included, and the activities of the outfit in saddling and getting away were suggestive of a prairie fire or a stampede. I accompanied them across the river, and then turned upstream to my brother's camp, promising to join them later and make a full day of it. At Bob's wagon they had stretched a fly, and in its shade lounged half a dozen men, while ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams

... said that the snakes and owls and prairie dogs are great friends," suggested Grant. "They all live together in the ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay

... found growing naturally outside of Ontario. It has been planted in Manitoba but does not do well there because of the cold winter. In 1917 the writer observed a few specimens near Portage la Prairie which were about five feet tall. These trees made a fair annual growth but most of this froze back ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various

... Prairie freighting and Missouri river navigation, were of importance before the construction of the Union Pacific railway, and the activity of the city in securing the freighting interest gave her an initial start over the other cities of the state. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall

... not, however, devoid of human inhabitants. Some wandering tribes had been for ages scattered among the forest shades or the green pastures of the prairie. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the delta of the Mississippi, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, these savages possessed certain points of resemblance which bore witness of their common origin; ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... very well to trample on it, sir,' John went on, scouring a very prairie of wild words, 'if a person can make up his mind to be guilty of the action. It's all very well to trample on it, but it's there. It may be that it couldn't be trampled upon if it wasn't there. But that doesn't make it gentlemanly, that doesn't make it honourable, that ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... find it impossible to stop him. He kept along, tossing his head proudly, and occasionally neighing, as much as to say, "Come on, my hearties, you see I ha'n't forgot our old amusement yet." And they did come on with a vengeance, clatter, clatter, clatter, as if so many fiends had broke loose. The prairie lay extended before me as far as the eye could reach, and I began to think that there would be ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott

... the shoulders spread, to the south-west, terminating abruptly in a much smaller but very picturesque mountain named Chiann, while to the north they merge into a spur called the Divide, which melts away eastward into the rolling prairie, first throwing off, some four miles to the east, another spur, this breaking into the irregular shapes of bluffs curves towards the south, extending the shelter that the mountains on the west afford sufficiently to break the force of wind from the north-east, and leaving the plateau ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money

... you. I wonder you and father don't turn to law books or rulings or something! I want you to take me out plover-shooting this afternoon. Long Prairie is just alive with them. Don't say no, please! I want to try my new twelve-bore hammerless. I've sent to the livery stable to engage Fly and Bess for the buckboard; they stand fire so nicely. I was sure you ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... glory of an almost unbelievable beauty, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, who sat with his shoulder back of that of the author of his play, seemed to behold a vision with his trained theatrical foresight. This slender, powerful young woman, with the rose dusk of the prairie sun on her cheeks, the depths of the great canons in her dark eyes, and the breadth of the far horizons across her broad brow seemed to him to typify the rise of order in her profession, over which so long had ruled chaos. And as her rich ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess

... snapping veils. The car trailed a long streamer of dust that tasted of the road. When this was penetrated they entered upon a stretch of pleasant travel for eyes and wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful prairie, a very allegory ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... the sea, near patches of brown seaweed that rolled on the waves with a movement like carpets on a line in a gale. The birds sat comfortably in groups, and they were envied by some in the dingey, for the wrath of the sea was no more to them than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland. Often they came very close and stared at the men with black bead-like eyes. At these times they were uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny, and the men hooted angrily at them, telling them to be gone. One came, and evidently decided to alight on the top ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... their homes. Some went to the river, some to the forest, and some to the prairie, to wait for the day when they must meet at the lodge ...
— The Book of Nature Myths • Florence Holbrook

... were officers who forbade their senseless slaughter to make food only for the worthless, prowling coyotes. No wonder the trooper hated to leave the foothills of the mountains, with the cold, clear trout streams and the bracing air, to take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie, covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless, springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull pools of stagnant water still held out against the sun, or, further still ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King

... the road is determined to a considerable extent by the existing right-of-way, which may follow section lines, regardless of topography, as is the case with many roads in the prairie states, or it may follow the valleys, ridges, or other favorable location in hilly country. In many places the roads of necessity wind around among the hills in order to avoid excessive grades. In designing an improvement, ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg

... Lake Superior, where a belt of granite lifts itself above the surrounding woodlands), yet there is, everywhere, either a patch of timber, a valley bounded by gently receding country, or some gem of a lake set in the more open rolling prairie—all adding beauty and endless variety to the ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill

... any pianos to loll round!"—this, just to see her brother-in-law's dark scowl; for no love—not even a liking—was lost between her and John. But with this handful of exceptions all nobly toed the line. Ladies with the tiniest reeds of voices, which shook like reeds, warbled of Last Roses and Prairie Flowers; others, with more force but due decorum, cried to Willie that they had Missed Him, or coyly confessed to the presence of Silver Threads Among the Gold; and Mrs. Chinnery, an old-young woman with a long, lean neck, which she twisted ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... this connection let us glance at Montgomery County, Alabama, which, although not in the belt we are studying, is on the same prairie formation crossed by the Georgia Pacific Railway, on the edge of Mississippi. Compare it with Butler County, Ohio, which "shows the best record of any county in the West." In live stock ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... more genial than the Iroquois, of milder manners and more vivid fancy, and were regarded by these with a curious mixture of respect and contempt. Some writer has connected this difference with their preference for the open prairie country in contrast to the endless and sombre forests where were the homes of the Iroquois. Their history abounds in great men, whose ambitious plans were foiled by the levity of their allies and their want of persistence. They it was who under King Philip fought the Puritan fathers; ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... "De prairie-dog a mighty cur'ous somebody," he began one day, when they asked him for a tale. "Hit lives in de ground, more samer dan a ground-hog. But dey ain't come out for wood nor water; an' some folks thinks dey goes plumb down to de springs what feeds wells. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various

... morning, for he became, perhaps for the first time in his life, suddenly alive to the beauty of this woodland scenery. By degrees, toward the left, the brushwood became less dense, and several gray buildings appeared scattered over the glistening prairie. Soon after appeared a park, surrounded by low, crumbling walls, then a group of smoky roofs, and finally, surmounting a massive clump of ash-trees, two round towers with tops shaped like extinguishers. ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet

... complain daily dairy daisy drain dainty explain fail fain gain gait gaiter grain hail jail laid maid mail maim nail paid pail paint plain prairie praise quail rail rain raise raisin remain sail saint snail sprain stain straight strain tail train vain waist ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... Indian summer crept athwart the western skies; But a deeper dusk was burning in her dark and dreaming eyes, As she scanned the rolling prairie, Where the foothills ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson

... as Cherryvale; and neither place was a two-hours' train ride away. The most picturesque scenery she knew was at Rocky Ford; it was far from the place where the melons grow, but water, a ford and rocks were there, and it had always shone in that prairie land and in Missy's eyes as a haunt of nymphs, water-babies, the Great Spirit, and Nature's poetics generally—the Great Spirit was naturally associated with its inevitable legendary Indian love story. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... hearts of the people back. It was as though the whole nation were rushing towards the edge of the precipice which overhung the bottomless pit, like a herd of frightened horses on the prairie, and these men with their unaided hands turned them back. It would be impossible for one man to turn back a whole army in mad flight—he would necessarily be swept away in their rush; but this is precisely what the expression attributes to the exertions of Elijah and John. The one ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... nobody sold. But I heard them talk about selling em. They took em off to sell em. That was the worst part about slavery. The families was broke up. I never lived nowhere 'cept in South Carolina and Prairie County (Arkansas). My folks come here and they kept writing for me to come, and I come on the train. Mrs. Sellers son, Joe Sellers, killed himself, shot himself, one Sunday evening. Didn't know how ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... pave the highway between New England and California. As jubilant as young Lochinvar, I came out of the West one summer dawn, and took train for Heartsease. I had resolved to compass in a single week the innumerable landmarks that dot mountain and desert and prairie—to leap as it were from sea to sea, from the present to the past, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various

... things," she went on, bridling. "When you visit me I will show you a landscape in my parlor worth a thousand of the daubs people rave over. Half the time you can't tell whether they're trying to paint a tulip field or a prairie fire. Ridiculous! You can almost count the rings on the horns of the cows in this landscape. It's ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham

... no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,—knew nothing of Nature's laws, as you do. Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of the prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning, or, in the farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor vile thing she was, some coarse weight fell off, and ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... heart. He had knelt there once, and heard those words and taken these tokens of the Lord's death, with his heart swelling with love for Him who had not even refused to die. It had been a glorious day of June sunshine, when through the open windows came the robin's song and the prairie breeze laden with the perfume of wolf-willow blossoms and sweet-grass. He remembered how the tears had risen unbidden to his eyes—happy tears of love and loyalty—and he had felt that nothing could ever separate him from the Master whom he loved. But ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung

... O tan-faced prairie-boy, Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift, Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among the recruits You came, taciturn, with nothing to give—we but looked on each other, When lo! more than all the gifts ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black

... them at the camp. The man came up with that curiously silent, almost furtive gait, which no prairie Indian, however civilized, ever quite loses. It comes from long years of moccasin use, and an habitual bent knee walk. Peigan Charley considered himself unusually civilized. But it was for his native abilities that ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... around. "I tell you there is nothing like a fiddler to catch a petticoat," he said, with a sharp nudge of his elbow into Diotti's ribs. "When I played the Devil's Dream there wasn't a girl in the country could keep from dancing, and 'Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,' brought them on their knees to me every time;" then after a pause, "I don't believe people fiddle as well nowadays as they did in the good old times," and he ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa

... ways he was healthy and manly, without any tinge of the mere student or public official. He loved everything that was large. His soul expanded in the free air and beneath the blue sky. All natural scenery appealed to him,—Niagara, the mountains, the rolling prairie, the great rivers,—but he found most contentment beside the limitless sea, amid brown marshes and sand-dunes, where the sense of infinite space is strongest. It was the same in regard to animals. He cared but little for horses or dogs, but he rejoiced in great herds of cattle, and especially in ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... stretch of plain between two mountain ranges, over a country entirely uninhabited except by the stage company's employees, who kept the stations and tended the stock. This lone woman had seen but one other woman on the road. Plenty of teams—great "prairie schooners," loaded with every conceivable thing for supplying the wants of an isolated non-producing community, and drawn by ten or fourteen mules—had been passed through ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... tourist sleeper, was filled with goldseekers, some of them bound for the Stikeen River, some for Skagway. While a few like myself had set out for Teslin Lake by way of "The Prairie Route." There were women going to join their husbands at Dawson City, and young girls on their way to Vancouver and Seattle, and ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... at Mr. Bramley Moore's a little while ago, we had a prairie-hen from the West of America. It was a very delicate bird, and a gentleman carved it most skilfully to a dozen guests, and had still a second slice to ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... robber o'er the prairie stalks And calls the land his own, And he who talks as Slavery talks Is free to talk alone. But tell the knaves we are not slaves, And tell them slaves we ne'er will be; Come weal or woe, the world shall know. We 're free, we 're free, ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard

... Texas and the plains of New Mexico is very mountainous and lonely. Villages of prairie dogs here and there seem to be about all the living things that the traveler sees. These little animals burrow deep in the ground, thousands of them close together, and this is why it is called a prairie dog town. I was ...
— A Soldier in the Philippines • Needom N. Freeman

... were upon us. As we were out on an open prairie, we had a good sight of the Indians before they reached us; I saw by the leader's dress that it was a chief that was leading them. His head dress was composed of eagles' feathers, and he rode some thirty or forty yards ahead of the other warriors. When in gun shot ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan

... Downing Street, and it is my Lord Bathurst's brilliant idea that forever after the war there shall be a belt of twenty miles left waste forest and prairie between Canada and the United States, presumably to prevent democracy rolling across the northern boundary. Fortunately the rough horse sense of the frontiersman is wiser than the wisdom of the British statesman, and settlement continues ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... his eyebrows and looked out of the window upon a great stretch of open, rolling prairie, clothed sparely in grass that was showing faint green in the hollows, and with no water for miles—as he knew well—except for the rivers that hurried through narrow bottom lands guarded by high bluffs that were for the most part barren. The land ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... the facts here recorded has required two years. During that time the writer has listened to earnest farmers in prairie shacks, pioneers and newcomers, leaders and followers, and has watched these farmers at work in their "Farmers' Parliaments" where they assemble annually by the thousands. It is impossible thus to meet and know ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... Virginia, are really more valuable than the rich lands of the west; because, owing to facilities of intercourse with commercial cities by water, these lands can be bought, and cultivated by aid of guano, with more profit than the richest prairie farm in Illinois. Mr. Booth's testimony upon the durability of this manure, is enough to contradict all the assertions that "it is of no use for only one crop." On his land, strangers can easily tell where guano was ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson

... infinitely little men and women daring to buy and sell "short, snappy stuff" in this somber and terribly beautiful world of Balzac and Wells and Turgenieff. And pathos there was in that wasted year when Walter Babson sought to climb from the gossiping little prairie town to the grandeur of great capitals by learning to be an efficient manufacturer of "good, lively rural poems." He neglected even his college-entrance books, the Ruskin whose clots of gilt might have trained him to look for real ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... of the three factors to one another is necessarily very different in different branches of production. For instance, in the case of cattle-raising on a prairie, labor does very little, land almost everything. Hence an extensive, thinly populated country is best adapted to this species of production. But where land is scarce, as in wealthy and populous cities, human activity ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... who paid me the compliment to say that he had read my book, and that he would walk sis miles to see me any day. Such a flattering evidence of discriminating taste, of course, disposed my heart towards him; but when I went up and put my hand into his great prairie of a palm, I was as a grasshopper in my own eyes. I inquired who he was and was told he was one of the Duke of Argyll's farmers. I thought to myself if all the duke's farmers were of this pattern, that he might be able to speak to the enemy in ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... through the water and saw-grass to the camp. The wading was annoying and, to me, difficult; but at length we secured dry footing in the jungle on the island, and after a tortuous way through the tangled vegetation, which walled in the camp from the prairie, we entered the large clearing and the collection of lodges where the Indians were. These lodges, placed very close together and seemingly without order, were almost all made of white cotton cloths, which were each ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley

... town of Zitacuaro, where they were commanded by the Mexican general, Don Ignacio Rayon. There they had established a junta, independent of the government; and continued to launch forth their proclamations, powerless as the glow of the prairie fire after its flames have ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid

... condemnation made Winsome laugh. Ralph laughed along with her, which very much increased the anger of Andra, who turned away in silent indignation. It was hard to think, just when he had got the "prairie flower" of Craig Ronald (for whom he cherished a romantic attachment of the most desperate and picturesque kind) away from the house for a whole long afternoon at the fishing, that this great grown-up lout should come this way and spoil all his sport. ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... moved slowly forward, and before nightfall the long lines of its blue uniforms went over the prairie rolls in full sight of the fort. The Stars and Stripes were still flying above the badly damaged ramparts, and cheer after cheer went up from thousands of throats, including those of the rescued garrison. ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard

... beside a feeble, sputtering fire, while the deluge thrashed the roaring pines. The bustle of the city jarred on him that afternoon, and he wandered out of it, but the march, parched with thirst, through the feathery ashes of the brulee, rose up in his memory as he walked aimlessly toward the prairie, and he recalled Grenfell lying beside the lode he had died to find. It became a grim duty to hold his own, and once more he determined that his enemies should crush him before they laid their grasping hands on the mine. He shrank, however, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... wilderness, and on the opening of a wagon road to the new mines had built a wayside station which eventually developed into the present hotel. He had been divorced in a Western State by his wife "Rosalie," locally known as "The Prairie Flower of Elkham Creek," for incompatibility of temper! ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte

... still with their faces turned to the west, and marched for some days over an immense prairie, which seemed to them to have been once the bottom of a huge lake. A rather striking circumstance is, that nearly every height in this region has its romance of savage life. We give one of murder, for the benefit of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... different conditions. Where a tribe has made considerable advance and lives on fertile farming soil it is possible to allot the members lands in severalty much as is the case with white settlers. There are other tribes where such a course is not desirable. On the arid prairie lands the effort should be to induce the Indians to lead pastoral rather than agricultural lives, and to permit them to settle in villages rather than ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... West are now being cut up into small farms. The nester has come, and come to stay. Gone is the buffalo, the Indian warwhoop, the free grass of the open plain;—even the stinging lizard, the horned frog, the centipede, the prairie dog, the rattlesnake, are fast disappearing. Save in some of the secluded valleys of southern New Mexico, the old-time round-up is no more; the trails to Kansas and to Montana have become grass-grown or lost in fields of waving grain; the maverick steer, the regal longhorn, has been supplanted ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various

... high-heeled boots and gaudy attire had gathered for the Frontier Day celebration. Hundreds of cars had poured up from Denver. Trains had disgorged thousands of tourists come to see the festival. Many people would sleep out in automobiles and on the prairie. The late comers at restaurants and hotels would wait ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine

... statement which he made under oath in 1872 indicates that he did not connive at the destruction of Columbia. "If I had made up my mind to burn Columbia," he declared, "I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common prairie dog village; but I did ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... has for its object to furnish an improved plow for breaking up sod or prairie land, which shall be strong and durable in construction and ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... and the lands beyond were, however, by chartered right the hunting preserve of the Hudson's Bay Company, of which more will be said. Presumably this company interfered, for unofficial word came from England to Selkirk that the scheme of colonizing the prairie region west of Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes would not be pleasing to the government. Selkirk, however, quickly turned elsewhere. He secured land for his settlers in Prince Edward Island, in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The prospective colonists, numbering ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood

... how the rough, dusty boulders and sand of disintegration from the upper ledges wreathe in beauty the next and next below with these wonderful taluses, and how the colors are finer the faster the waste. We oftentimes see nature giving beauty for ashes,—as in the flowers of a prairie after fire,—but here the very dust and ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir

... itself, but at present, at any rate, nobody can see the faintest chance of anything of the sort. The probabilities are, on the contrary, that as the American competition increases, land will gradually sink to something like a prairie value." ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard

... from its mouth. The father of Wabashaw was a noted Indian; and during the past summer, the son has given some indications that he inherits the father's talents and courage. When the Winnebagoes arrived at Wabashaw's prairie, the chief induced them not to continue their journey of removal; offered them land to settle upon near him, and told them it was not really the wish of their Great Father, that they should remove. His bribes and eloquence induced the Winnebagoes to refuse to proceed; although there was ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman

... purposes of a highly civilised population. Over 900,000 square miles are already occupied, and of the occupied area fully one half has been "improved." The older provinces are, acre for acre, as suitable for agricultural pursuits as the adjoining States of the Union. Manitoba, the "Prairie Province," is almost one vast wheat field, with a productivity for wheat unequalled anywhere except in the Red River valley of Minnesota and Dakota. The Manitoba grain harvest foots up to 50,000,000 bushels. British Columbia is a land of almost infinite possibilities, ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various

... the new and modern square dances and tabulated forms for the guidance of the leader or others in calling them. Full and complete directions for performing every known square dance, such as Plain Quadrilles, Polka Quadrilles, Prairie Queen, Varieties Quadrille, Francaise, Dixie Figure, Girl I Left Behind Me, Old Dan Tucker, Money Musk, Waltz Lanciers, Military Lanciers, Columbian Lanciers, Oakland Minuet, Waltz Quadrilles, etc. The "German" introduces over ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis

... some climbing plants, from his house afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have displaced the old glaring colors with soft beauty and grace. Before I left Weston, which happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine clambering over half the houses in the place, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... and John Ziska, the famous blind general, took the lead of the Taborite army, and, standing on a wagon, with the banner above him emblazoned with the Hussite Cup, he swept the country from end to end like a devouring prairie fire. It is held now by military experts that Ziska was the greatest military genius of the age. If military genius could have saved Bohemia, Bohemia would now have been saved. For some years he managed ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... they caught the 2:45 local up to Delphi. Kit could hardly keep from looking out of the car window all the time. Every now and then the rich blueness of the lake would flash through the trees in the distance, and to the westward there stretched long level vistas of prairie land, dipping ravines which unexpectedly led one into woodland ways. Gradually the bluffs heightened as they neared the Wisconsin line above Waukegan, and just beyond the state line, between the shore and the region of the small lakes, Oconomowoc and Delevan, they came suddenly upon ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester

... in the midst of a level prairie that stretched all round to the horizon, where it was broken by patches of timber; the rising sun slanted across the green expanse, and turned its distance to gold; the grass at their feet was full of wild-flowers, ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells

... the few wild creatures that you can see from the train. Each time I have come to the Yellowstone Park I have discovered the swift gray form of the Coyote among the Prairie-dog towns along the River flat between Livingstone and Gardiner, and in the Park itself have seen him nearly every day, and heard him every night ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton

... men, and his heart made like the beasts', and his dwelling was with the wild asses, and they fed him with grass, like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, even so did the Spirit drive me forth into the tabernacles of the wild men of the forest and the prairie, and I sojourned with them many days. But He doth not always chide, neither keepeth He His anger for ever. In His own good time, He snatched me from the fiery furnace, and bade me here wait for His salvation; and here, years, long years, have ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... He's so strong now that he can almost lift himself up by his two little hands. At least he can really and actually give a little pull. Two days ago our touring-car arrived. It is a beauty. It skims over these smooth prairie trails like a yacht. From now on we can run into Buckhorn, do our shopping, and run out again inside of two or three hours. We can also reach the larger towns without trouble and it will be so much easier to gather up what we need for Casa Grande. Dinky-Dink seems to love ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer

... tomatoes have been, and can be, obtained from soils of varying composition, from a gumbo prairie, a black marsh muck, or a stiff, tenacious clay, to one of light drifting sand, provided other conditions, such as drainage, tilth and fertility are favorable. The Connecticut experiment station and others have secured good results from plants grown under glass in a soil of sifted coal ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy

... involving so heavy an expenditure—about 1,300,000 pounds—was not projected without sufficient cause. The Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, upwards of 1200 miles in length, traverses British North America from the shores of the Atlantic to the rich prairie country of the Far West. It opens up a vast extent of fertile territory for future immigration, and provides a ready means for transporting the varied products of the Western States to the seaboard. So long as the St. ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... lighted in the corner of yonder swamp," he said, pointing, as he spoke, to a bit of low land that sustained a growth of much larger trees than those which grew in the "opening," "or it has crossed the point of the wood, and struck across the prairie beyond, and made for a bit of thick forest that is to be found about three miles further. In the last case, I shall ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... Setting Sun, the prairie schooner is the center of the group of the Nations of the West, on the top a figure of Enterprise, the Spirit of the West. (p. 59.) On either side of her is a boy. These are the Heroes of Tomorrow. Between the oxen ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... a little bit, like that. A pill no bigger than a couple of aspirins or an Alka-Seltzer. It's only in the morning you take it when it's old and strong like this, for a pick-me-up, a cure for a hangover, you know, like a prairie oyster ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown

... revenge, however. Some time afterward Barnum became president of the Pequonnock Bank, and gave each year a grand dinner at Iranistan to the directors. In preparing for these banquets he would send to the West for some boxes of prairie chickens and other choice game. So, one day, Johnson saw a big case at the railroad station, addressed to Barnum, and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... The other is more like our own country, and I ain't sure that it isn't quite as handsome as the other. But I think I prize the mocassins most. The name, the shape, and the ornaments all tell of the prairie." ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... Jim Torrance at such an hour came the appeal of dimly reverent things. Here on the fringe of prairie and forest, in the vast spaces of Northern Canada where wolf met coyote, Torrance was waging a big fight. Last year he had brought the grade, a simple task, east of the mountains. Somewhere far down the list of sub-sub-contractors—fleas ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan

... through the mill in one, you wouldn't kinder like to hev a share in another. Snakes and alligators! Why, a blizzard will shave you as clean as the best barber in Boston, and then friz the marrow in your bones an' blow you to Jericho. It's sarten death to be caught out on the prairie in one of 'em: your friends won't find your body till the snow melts in the spring. I guess you wouldn't ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... village of Ingenio, a brisk south wind blew the dust in our faces and retarded our speed. All round the trees bent before the squall, and the large plantain leaves flew about, torn into ribbons. We now turned to the right, and crossed a prairie. L'Encuerado required breath, for his load weighed at least eighty pounds, although, like AEsop's burden, it would surely get lighter at every meal. An enormous rock, which had tumbled down from one of the surrounding mountains centuries past, offered us a retreat sheltered from the ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... Buffalo, and again he started toward the Mouse, as if to trample him under his feet. The little fellow was nowhere to be seen, but in a minute the Buffalo felt him in the other ear. Once more he became wild with pain, and ran here and there over the prairie, at times leaping high in the air. At last he fell to the ground and lay quite still. The Mouse came out of his ear, and stood proudly upon his ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman

... along which, from the Missouri to the Great Basin, Nature has presented not a single obstacle to the progress of the heaviest loaded teams. From the frontier, at Fort Leavenworth, it sweeps over a broad rolling prairie to the Platte, a river shallow, but of great width, whose course is as straight as an arrow. Pursuing the river-bottom more than three hundred miles, to the Black Hills, steep mounds dotted with dark pines and cedars, it enters the broad belt of mountainous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... grasp and a ringing word and dismiss him with a cheery laugh that filled the Blue Room with infectious good nature."(6) Carpenter, the portrait painter, who for a time saw him daily, says that "his laugh stood by itself. The neigh of a wild horse on his native prairie is not more undisguised and hearty." An intimate friend called it his ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... air; they broke asunder in panic; there was never an end to it all. And far out in the distance the sun went down in a flame-red mist. A streak of cloud lay across it, stretching far out into infinity. A conflagration like a glowing prairie fire surrounded the horizon, and drove the hordes before it in panic-stricken flight, and on the beach shouted the naked swarm of boys. Now and again they sprang up with outspread arms, and, shouting, chased the wild horses back ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... a stretch of grassy prairie to a fence. This surmounted, there came a ploughed field, of considerable extent to one carrying an inconvenient box. At the farther end of this was another fence, and beyond this an ancient orchard with a grassy floor, where lingered a few old apple-trees, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson



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